Email

Print

After more than 20 days of the restricted movement in observance of the State of Emergency regulations and the curfew, you may be craving a bit of freedom from your homes. But, a group of students from Saint John’s College Junior College has put that time to such productive use, that they’ve come up with a creation that has impressed their instructor, Yasser Musa.

He gave them a project for their design course, in which they were supposed to create a magazine. But then, COVID-19 struck the world, and when school was canceled, they had to resort to online resources to continue their studies. The students rose to the challenge and created an electronic Magazine called CLAIRE. The quality of their work exceeded the expectations of their instructor, so much so, that he shared it with our newsroom, as a welcomed break all the unpleasant elements accompanying the coronavirus pandemic.

We reached out to one of the students who was given the responsibility of Art Direction in the E-magazine. This afternoon, he told us via video chat that it was a challenging project to carry out, given that each participant had to make their contributions, in the hopes that the others would also deliver on their assigned task as well. 

Here’s what he had to say about the group effort to make this assignment a success:

Jaye Wagner - Art Director, CLAIRE Art Magazine
"CLAIRE Art Magazine was originally a simple magazine project, 50 pages, assigned to us by our design teacher, Mr. Yasser Musa. And essentially, what we had to do was to choose any of topic for our magazine. And we, design students, were very comfortable with the arts. So, we decided to go with that, since it would much easier to unify. We needed 2 people to coordinate the magazine, essentially. That was an art director and a curator, and we elected 2 people. One of them was me, and another person, Patrick Castillo as curator. When that happened, that was the last time that we actually saw each other physically as a class. And then, school closed, and the entire COVID-19 situation became much more dire. We had a WhatsApp group chat to communicate however, it was very complicated. Basically what we did for CLAIRE was a collection of our best art works over a period of time. So, it could be long ago, when we were younger, up until now. We put it in categories. We had photography, fashion design, web design and different types. We also had things that were related to real life, especially the whole COVID situation, and that’s basically what our magazine was about."

Reporter
"What are the main take-aways that you expect that viewers of the magazine will get from the choices of imagery and arts that you all chose."

Jaye Wagner
"Well, I hope people begin to realize again that the arts are just as important. And the arts surround us in everyday-life. There is fashion. There’s web designs. There’s photography. And all of those things we need within our lives, however, in the last 40 years, people have begun to see the arts as something lesser. They see it as something that’s just a man at an easel for 6 hours a day, painting. However, it’s more than that. The arts surround us."

If you like to take a look at the magazine: https://www.docdroid.net/61T6IAK/claire-magazine-art-design-by-a-young-collective-of-belizean-students-pdf#page=11